BUT, I don't have the time or energy at the moment to do so. So I am looking for some free templates out there that are very basic... just want the links up top, wordpress style, for website, contact, about, etc... i know i have seen lots of blogger blogs set up this way.

any suggestions for somewhere to peruse some blogger blog templates (I know I can google it... but wanted some recommendations first if possible)???

I haven't been able to find any great templates for Blogger except for ones that cost a good amount. I tweaked mine on my own. I still have a few small kinks to work out for it to display properly on older browsers.

Rodolfo Arpia does some nice things with blogger here.

I designed mine using minima and building from scratch. I understand though, it would have been a lot easier if there were templates out there that work just like right, and I searched. I know there are some better examples out there, there are a few OSPers who have done some amazing stuff with their codes. Someday I hope to have a professional design my logo and blog design, but for the time being this will work for me.

The trickiest part for me was creating the menu bar. There are some great resources at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ The chrome css version looks nice.

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/ is a good standby for customizing some of the HTML codes.

Try the best find that we have found for blogger templates and help, including all the html code for changing Blogger's own templates...
bloggerbuster.com.